This post talks about your sales funnel, and the importance of implementing the first part of it within your website.

Your sales funnel is the series of steps your customers go though in the process of becoming a customer. The image on the right displays a generic sales funnel of:

They become aware of you and your offering

They express an interest in your offering

They learn more and it looks good

They make the purchase

Not every sales funnel is that generic. If you sell fairly inexpensive items (books for example) your sales funnel may be; go to store, buy book. For bigger ticket items (cars for example) things are not that straight forward. Your customers do research and if you want to maintain contact with them, provide them a way to do that research on your website.

What’s important is that you understand the thought process your customers went through in the process of becoming your customer. If needed, ask a few recent customers how and why they choose you. You’re actually less interested in why (although you are interested) than in how.

How they choose you is the series of steps they went through.

Once you understand the first few steps, you then implement them on your website, whatever they may be.